


Per Aspera Ad Astra

by BeccaStareyes



Category: PlanetES
Genre: Gen, Immigrant Character, Instrospection, Missing Scene, latina character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeccaStareyes/pseuds/BeccaStareyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire renews her ties to her native tongue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Per Aspera Ad Astra

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pts/gifts).



> Set sometime between episodes 11 and 20.

Claire remembered what it was like to feel like an outcast. She had felt like one all through school. It wasn't just that she had moved from El Tanika, so spoke only the local language and enough Spanish that the ESL teachers could put her with the kids from the rest of Latin America, but not enough that she could really make friends. Or that her parents had gone from typical in their village to dirt-poor in America. It was that she was constantly feeling stupid -- too slow at English, illiterate when her classmates could at least read something.

Her parents praised her when she was able to speak to bill collectors over the phone, or read maps or the labels on the food they bought, or show them how to use a cell phone or a computer. In return, she worked on hiding her accent by listening to her classmates, buying the clothing they bought and listening to the music they listened to. Becoming an American girl, a child of two centuries of prosperity, instead of the daughter of an El Tanikan farmer.

She knew that her parents had given up their lives for her future, but she couldn't bring herself to keep their past alive. Because she didn't want to remember the little immigrant girl who had been outside of everything. Her parents never said anything, and Claire never knew if they were proud of their girl, who had gone from the mud to the stars, or if they would trade her for someone who would sit with her mother after the work was done and be nagged about finding a nice boy and starting a family.

And, now, she had ordered an ebook and recordings on El Tanikan and sat up late at night in the tiny sleeping room Technora gave all of its employees -- at least the rank and file. She read about the language -- it was a creole of the native languages and Spanish, and the writing system was only one of two created in the post-Colombian Americas after seeing the power that Spanish and Portuguese missionaries held. She practiced the letters in handwriting that didn't look like a child's first attempts at all, but occasionally jagged left and right, as the letters tried to shape themselves into English. And she learned the words she never would have known as a child by reading books by those who had refused to shed their culture like an old skin when they left.

And she remembered the scenes of her childhood, or maybe replaced the memories with glossy photographs taken by returning expats and Peace Corps workers. But the sound of the language brought back the smell of her mother's cooking and the sounds of the village she had been born with. And Claire wondered maybe if what she had gained wasn't worth what she had given up.

**Author's Note:**

> Invented the details of the El Tanikan language based on what we saw -- it didn't use Roman letters (and Claire couldn't even spot names in it), and was in the wrong part of the world for anything else, so I decided it was like Cherokee in that someone created a writing system for it. Also, the fact that people spoke it and not Spanish or Portuguese (the country looked to be somewhere near the Brazilian-Peru border) implied it was a native language or a creole. Heck, at this point I was half working out a detailed history about the place. This was something I wanted to write anyway, so I totally used Yuletide and another Claire fan as an excuse.


End file.
